Brandie Connell waits with her son Cory, five, at the Food Bank of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
Photograph: James Robinson/Guardian

Even as Barack Obama tours the country to promote his middle-class economic plan, American families increasingly need public assistance to help put food on the table. A new report by the US census bureau found that 16 million children live in families that receive food stamps, a number that almost doubled between 2007 and 2014.

The numbers imply that one in five US children would have gone hungry last year had their family not qualified for public assistance.

The number of children living in poverty has risen sharply since the Great Recession. Before that, just one in eight US children – about 9 million – received food stamps.

Bolstering the evidence that more children are living in poverty, a recent report from the Southern Education Foundation found that more than half the children attending public school in the United States qualified for federal programs for free or reduced-price lunches. That percentage is the highest in at least 50 years, the SEF found.

The implications of the census data could be important for the Obama administration after focusing heavily on economic policy for the middle class in the State of the Union address despite not proposing any programs to lessen poverty.

Even after Congress cut $8.6bn from food stamps a year ago, the issue of food insecurity was barely mentioned during the 2014 election.

Why aren't food stamps an issue in midterm elections?

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Obama’s rivals, including Republican Paul Ryan, have seized on the president’s relative silence by proposing their own plans that purport to reduce poverty.

Ryan in particular set his sights on overhauling federal aid for the poor last year in a 200-page report that took aim at everything from Head Start to Medicaid. The Wisconsin congressman argued in a speech last summer that “we spend $800bn each year on 92 programs at the federal level just to fight poverty. And yet we have the highest poverty rate in a generation ...You have to think we can do better than this.”

A large part of Ryan’s argument rests on the premise that federal aid weakens the ability of people to stand on their own feet. Political discussions about public assistance programs in America frequently lead to heated partisan debates about whether poor Americans are living on the government’s largesse.

But the census data released today defies a number of stereotypes about Americans who depend on public assistance.

For instance, it’s not just children with single parents who are at risk of going hungry. Even though the number of families with single mothers that depend on food stamps rose by 30% in the last seven years, the number of families with married parents who receive food stamps almost doubled, reaching 5.2 million. That’s compared to just 2.7 million in 2007.

It’s impossible to blame children for their situations, Dave Reaney, the executive director of an Alabama food bank, told the Guardian.

“You can’t blame the child, no matter what the circumstances. A two-year-old can’t take care of themselves,” he said. “Even the toughest, hard-nosed, anti-government-funding person would say: ‘Well, kids ought to be able to eat good.’”

In 2013, 44% of children under the age 18 lived in low-income families – those with an income below $47,000 a year for a family of four. That’s equivalent to 31.8 million US children, according to a report from the National Center for Children in poverty at Columbia University.

The center also found that about 22% of children live in poor families, with income below $24,000 a year.

“Far too many American children live in economically insecure families, and this serious threat to our nation’s future does not get the attention it deserves,” said the center’s director, Renée Wilson-Simmons.